The invention relates generally to the field of data storage, and more particularly to data storage on mobile devices.
Digital multimedia is growing at an enormous rate. More and more people are converting their personal media libraries to digital media. In addition, many consumers now purchase music and other media in digital format originally, eliminating the conversion process. Digital media has the benefit of being very portable. Many handheld computing devices can store digital media files to be played while the user is mobile, such as while exercising, driving, flying, or otherwise on the move.
Because of the convenience, many users desire to keep as much of their digital media libraries on their portable devices as possible. However, digital media files consume a relatively large amount of storage space, and computing devices generally have a limited storage capacity, especially mobile devices. So users must often settle for having less than their entire library on their mobile devices. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that manually migrating media files on to or off of portable computing devices is often a somewhat confusing process. For these reasons, users have tended not to change the content stored on their mobile devices that often.
A few attempts at solving this problem have evolved. One such attempt is essentially the “brute force” method of enlarging the storage capacity of computing devices. Larger and larger storage media, such as hard disk drives or flash memory drives, are constantly being created. One problem with this method is that it makes portable devices more and more expensive, consume more power, and sometimes larger than desired. The limited storage problem is more compelling in the area of portable devices, but also applies in other areas, such as in laptop, notebook, desktop, and other computing devices.
Another attempt to address the problem involves automating the process of changing the media files that are stored on the computing device. Some automated processes exist for copying media files from permanent storage, such as the user's desktop computing device, to the user's portable device. In practice, those media files that a user rarely invokes (e.g., listens to or views) are completely removed from the computing device, and new ones are copied to it. This process is often performed during a synchronization operation while the portable device is physically connected to the device that includes the library.
One shortcoming of this process is that to identify the files to include on the portable device, the user must interact with some remote data management utility that resides somewhere other than on the portable device, typically wherever the complete media library resides. For that reason, the user cannot easily identify, on the portable device, what content to include. Rather, the user must return to the computing device on which the data management utility resides. This requires advanced planning by the user, and often doesn't happen. An alternative is that the data management utility can randomly select new files to include, which of course is not likely to coincide with the content that the user would have personally selected.
An adequate method and mechanism for managing media data storage has eluded those skilled in the art, until now.